About

Contra Mundum Press is a New York-based independent publishing house with a global vision. We publish challenging and visionary books by writers whose thinking and aesthetics are in opposition to timely or mainstream currents of thought, value systems, or moralities.

Since our inception in 2012, we have published translations from over 14 different languages, including several bi- and multilingual books from a variety of genres. In 2020, in we inaugurated our Agrodolce Series, a source of unorthodox books on food. Our online art journal, Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, which has an international readership stretching from the Americas to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, has featured translations, interviews, essays, and reviews. From time to time, we publish special issues on select artists and writers

Our vision is informed by a poetics of hospitality. As a purveyor of lone and often forgotten or exiled voices, Contra Mundum serves as a home to world culture, welcoming the voices, and so the lives and experiences, of “foreigners.”

Our publications have been heralded in the pages of The Times Literary Supplement, The New Statesman, The Guardian, the Paris Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, amongst others.  From Gilgamesh to Adonis and Emilio Villa, in publishing translations from as many different languages as we have, Contra Mundum not only welcomes strangers into its house, but presents them to the English-reading public as our honored guests.

There are many works of fundamental significance to world culture that still remain in relative oblivion, works that alter and disrupt standard circuits of thought — these warrant being encountered by the world at large. It is our aim to render them more visible.